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Daily Archives: February 18, 2009

This version of the Composite Application Guidance is designed to help you build applications in WPF and Silverlight that have a single code base. The guidance uses a number of design patterns. Familiarity with these technologies and patterns is useful for evaluating and adopting the Composite Application Library.

Community Feedback and Support

Included in the Composite Application Guidance

Stock Trader Reference Implementation (Stock Trader RI)

This is a sample composite application that is based on a real-world scenario. This intentionally incomplete application illustrates the Composite Application baseline architecture. This is a good reference to see how many of the challenges are addressed by this guidance when building composite applications.

Composite Application Library source code

Developers can use the Composite Application Library to develop WPF or Silverlight applications that are composed of independent and collaborating modules. The library includes extensions to support the integration of the Unity Application Block.

QuickStarts

These include the source code for several small, focused applications that illustrate user interface (UI) composition, modularity, commanding, event aggregation, and multi-targeting applications between WPF and Silverlight. The Getting Started Hands-On Labsprovide step-by-step instructions to create your first application using the Composite Application Library in WPF or Silverlight.

Documentation

This includes the architectural overview, Stock Trader RI overview, design and technical concepts for composite applications, applied patterns, How-to topics, QuickStart overviews, and deployment topics. Much of this guidance is applicable even if you are not using the Composite Application Library, but you want to know best practices for creating composite applications.

Tech layoffs may have hit 300,000 since the financial crisis began, but there are at least 395,629 job openings in information technology, enough to re-employ all of those now out of work. Job search engine Indeed this morning launched a new Industry Trends page filled with stats on job openings in the U.S. across major industries. Although there are more job openings in IT than in any other industry except healthcare (which has 581,625 job listings).

The first thing to know about the SLS is that most of the time you can ignore it! It is possible to become quite proficient in Silverlight programming without even knowing explicitly that the system exists, much less having to override any of its methods. For most developers, most of the time, the layout system is implicit and mediated for you by layout controls such as the GridPanel and StackPanel, and more recently by the Silverlight Toolkit layout controls such as the DockPanel and the WrapPanel.

That said, there are times when you want to do something the existing controls just don’t provide, and familiarity with how Silverlight lays out controls can be both fascinating and essential.